• Collect insightful customer feedback
• Understand your product’s competitive strengths and weaknesses
• Resolve product defects early on
• Reduce the risk of product performance problems later on
• Meet or exceed customer expectations
• Test your product’s usability and adjust its features accordingly

Ideally, you should use this product testing survey template together with our product/market fit template. Both will help you ensure that your product meets the needs of the target audience it’s designed for.

When should you use product testing surveys?

In this case: once you have developed a minimum viable product (MVP). This is an early version of your product with only the essential features that potential customers/users can use to validate, test, and provide feedback. If you want to get your product to market quickly, surveying customers who have trialled your MVP will give you crucial feedback.

The sooner you ask for feedback on your product idea, the less guesswork and wasted resources will go into getting your product to market. The kind of survey questions to ask will depend on the product type, industry, and stage of product development you’re at. Once you have an idea of the type of insights you’re looking for, you can customise our product testing survey template to ask probing survey questions based on categories such as:

1. Appeal: Do customers find its aesthetic design enticing? If not, which features did they find unattractive?
2. Believability: Do they find the product’s messaging believable? For example, can it really remove 99% of stubborn stains?
3. Innovativeness: What is the primary benefit that stood out? Which features do they feel the most uncertain about?
4. Usability: Which features were the easiest or the most intuitive to use? Which were the most challenging or confusing? Which problems are they using it to solve?
5. Purchase Intent: Do people want to buy your product? What other solutions would they consider? How would they feel if the product disappeared from the market?
6. Quality: Does your product seem high quality?
7. Relevance: Does your product fulfil customers’ needs and wants?
8. Uniqueness: Is it different to other products or solutions they’ve tried?
9. Value: Is the product good value, and which aspect (e.g. price, durability) is the most/least valuable?

Depending on the feedback you receive, your product might have to go through several iterations (i.e. repeating the design and development cycle to resolve issues) to be market fit and ready for launch. With each iteration, modify the product testing survey template accordingly and re-survey the target audience. Is it better aligned with their expectations? Have the pain points they mentioned been addressed?

By regularly sending surveys and getting customer feedback, you’ll also help to increase customer retention in the long term. Showing that you genuinely care about the problem your product is trying to solve improves customer relations, establishes empathy, and helps to build your brand. Customers who love your product and feel like you see them will be your best product ambassadors whose personal recommendations will help solidify your product’s success!

How to use our customer feedback survey

Download and share our product testing survey with your team and customise the questions collaboratively. This is also an excellent opportunity to encourage your team to look at the product from different perspectives, such as sales/marketing, design/engineering, and, more importantly, the end-users.

Lastly, remember that how you distribute your survey is crucial, as it won’t do you much good if nobody responds. Survey participation relies heavily on the ease and enjoyability of the overall experience, so ensure that your survey is as unobtrusive as possible and gives participants the right motivation to complete it:

• Email survey distribution: If you’re sending an HTML email to users who were part of your product testing group, embed the first survey question directly into the body of the mail to increase the response rate. Email surveys also have a higher participation rate when personalised and incentivised, e.g. Hi Ben, please take a short survey and get 10% off.
• SMS survey distribution: A good way to get users’ immediate feedback while on the go. Send a code with an invitation to the survey, or send the questions directly in the text. As with emails, this works best when personalised and incentivised.
• Website surveys: Best for getting a real-time response to customers’ actions on your site, and they have a good response rate when they’re short, uncluttered, and clearly labelled.
• URL link survey: A highly versatile and efficient way to distribute your surveys as they can be embedded into an article, shared on social media, or printed out.

There are many factors to consider when deciding how and when to send surveys, so take the time to research your options. Remember to follow best practice guidelines when looking for customer participation (e.g. ask them to opt-in, get consent, and protect their privacy or personal data) to ensure optimal participation. Keep surveys short; let participants know how long it will take to complete; and start with the questions that are the most important to you first.

Did you find this product testing survey helpful?

We hope so!

Remember that these templates are simply a guide to help you spark conversations and develop insights regarding what your customers want. That said, you won’t be able to please everybody all the time, so the metrics you establish to assess your product’s market fit are important: this will help you remain focused on developing products that provide customers with solutions instead of catering to their whims.

Please share this template and let us know if it helped you find the answers you were looking for!